


Hard Decisions

by AngelSelene



Series: Wreckage [1]
Category: Criminal Minds (US TV), Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Fluff and Angst, M/M, Post FMA:B
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-20
Updated: 2020-12-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 23:34:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28195509
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AngelSelene/pseuds/AngelSelene
Summary: Ed and Roy are graduating from college, and SSA David Rossi has a proposition for Ed.For Roy/Ed Week 2020, crossover day. Prompt: "What's wrong?"
Relationships: Edward Elric/Roy Mustang
Series: Wreckage [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1924888
Comments: 30
Kudos: 402
Collections: Roy/Ed Week 2020





	Hard Decisions

“What’s wrong?” Roy asks, lifting Ed’s hair from where it was set over the arm of the sofa to dry so he could sit there. Both the hair and the arm are mostly dry. Roy cards his fingers through the length rather than tossing it over Ed’s shoulder. It’s gotten quite long in the last five years, Ed only cutting it when the ends are gross, which Roy knows he does for him. It’s nearly to his waist now. “You’ve been scowling at your tablet for the better part of an hour.”

“That fucking Rossi guy called. He wants me to come down and see him in Quantico.”

Roy frowns, hands stilling. “The profiler?” he asks. 

Ed hmms a confirmation, leaning back so his head is against Roy’s thigh in a silent ploy for Roy to play with his scalp, not just the length. Roy obliges with head scratches. “I downloaded a couple of his books.”

“And?” Roy asks.

“And that team deals with really fucking fucked-up sickos.”

One of these days, Roy is going to finish that calculation between the amount of times Ed uses some variation of the word _fuck_ and how sincerely agitated he is. “Then just tell him no,” he suggests, knowing that sometimes stating the obvious is the best way to get Ed to expand on something. 

“It’s just…” Ed trails but doesn’t continue. 

“It’s just a lot like what you used to do with rogue alchemist hunting in Amestris,” Roy finishes for him. Ed is not the only one who can do his own research, and Roy picked up a couple of Rossi’s books too, back when he first called Ed a couple years ago, following up after that the tip he gave the man after attending his seminar. 

“Yeah,” Ed confirms, but he doesn’t sound happy about it. “I think it’s a lot like it. Just reading these profiles… I did this shit, Roy. Like, no one ever taught it to me, but I knew the tendencies of the different kinds of freaks. I knew their warning signs. I knew what they did to hide, how they lied to people, which ones couldn’t. It’s fucking weird to realize that there’s literally a group of people whose job it is to think about psychos this way. I just thought that was how all police went about their jobs. It’s really just logic and patterns after all.”

It’s Roys turn to hmm as he thinks. “And how often did the local military liaisons you worked with actually know any of that information?” he asks. 

Ed snorts. “Point,” he says. 

“You’d be good at it. So go see him.”

Ed sighs and runs his hands over his face. Roy echos the sigh, puts down Ed’s hair, then goes around to sit on the couch in front of him. 

“What’s really wrong?” he asks. 

Dropping his hands from his face, Ed stares up at the ceiling of their apartment for a long minute. Their small, pretty shitty, barebones apartment that they probably still spend too much on because its location is perfect on campus, doesn’t look like it belongs to them. It’s one bedroom, a bathroom they can barely fit in together, and a tiny kitchen crammed in the corner. It’s also sparse, almost Spartan. Everything has a place and everything is in its place—mostly Roy’s OCD, he has to admit—but Ed borrows books, he doesn’t buy them, so there aren’t even a dozen books floating around that aren't library ones. The papers Roy was grading are in such neat stacks on the table that even Hawkeye wouldn’t be able to find fault with them.

“It’s been almost five years,” Ed says, shaking Roy out of his internal musings. “I’m graduating, you’re graduating, we both have jobs, and… we are no closer to going home than when we woke up in that fucking cow field.”

“I know,” Roy says softly. 

“I just… I feel like I’m not bolted down to anything. Like we’re here, and we have this life, and it’s just some weird stand-in, and it’s not what we should be doing at all…” He sits up abruptly. “And I’m graduating fucking college, and everyone I know is like ‘now my life starts,’ and they really have to decide what they’re going to be when they grow up, and… I thought I already made that decision. I thought I knew that path. Now I have to choose all over again and I just…” He flops backward again, throwing his flesh arm over his eyes. “It makes me feel really fucking old.” 

“That is something I can deeply empathize with,” Roy says.

Ed groans. “Fuck, it’s gotta be ten times worse for you. Starting all over.”

It’s certainly been challenging, but Ed knows that and there’s no reason to belabor the point. 

“So what is it about Rossi’s request that’s bothering you so much?”

Sitting up again, Ed says, “I’d be really good at it,” tapping at the case of the tablet still in his lap. 

“You would be really good at _anything_ you put a modicum of effort toward,” Roy points out. 

“Yeah, but I’d be _really_ good at this.”

“So what’s the problem?”

Ed meets his eyes, and Roy will never, ever get used to seeing brown eyes where there should be gold, even if he understands the necessity of wearing the contacts at home. “We’d have to move, for one, if I decide to do this. They operate out of Quantico, so we’d have to leave Pennsylvania behind.”

“We’ve done our best to verify that the location we landed is not meaningful,” Roy points out. “As far as we were able to determine, where we landed was entirely random and should not affect our ability to one day go back.”

“No, but if I do this…” He waves the tablet. “The hours these guys work are crazy, Roy. We barely have time to do research on how to get home _now._ ”

“Are you worried that taking this job is effectively giving up on going home?” Roy asks the real question. 

The look Ed gives him is raw. It is grief and exhaustion and longing and hopelessness. An old man who has lost something precious and now just needs to move on might look like that. It’s not a look that belongs in the eyes of a twenty-two-year-old, but then, Ed stopped being a child long ago. 

“I don’t want to give up,” Ed rasps, throat tight with emotion. 

As if Ed even understood _how_ to give up. Roy reaches out and pulls Ed down on top of him awkwardly, the tablet tumbling to the floor. Roy might have an inch in height on him, but Ed has a solid twenty pounds in muscle, and that’s discounting the automail, but the weight is oddly comforting. He lets Ed snuggle into his chest and listen to his heart as Roy runs his hand through his hair. 

“Living with the new reality doesn’t mean giving up going home,” he says softly. “But we’ve both been living this half-life, in limbo, participating in this world but not truly part of it. Maybe in order to find the way home, we have to be part of this one first.”

Ed snorts. “Would be like fucking Truth to only give us a way back when we had something to lose.”

“We never did figure out what the toll for coming here was,” Roy points out. “Maybe the toll is that the trip is one-way.”

“I don’t accept that,” Ed says, muffled with his face in Roy’s chest. 

“I know,” Roy says, not a platitude, just simple truth. “And that’s why I have faith that you’ll find a way back for us.”

“But your job…”

“I can find work wherever we go. All that matters to me is that we are together,” he says.

Ed’s flesh arm is hugging his waist and squeezes a little tighter. “... Love you,” he mumbles. 

Roy smiles. 

“I love you too.” 

.o0o.o0o.o0o.

When Ed calls Rossi back the next day, Roy is there, at his side. 

“Agent Rossi?” Ed asks when he picks up. “I don’t really have time to come down to Quantico before my finals, but if the invitation’s still open, I might be interested.” 

Supervisory Special Agent David Rossi chuckles on the other end of the line. “I’ve been waiting for your call,” he says. 

Ed rolls his eyes. “I wasn’t going to,” he says. 

“Of course you weren’t,” Rossi placates, and Ed’s eyes narrow. 

“You’re the one who wanted me, man. This is your shot. If you’ve changed your mind, I’ve got about half a dozen other offers on the table.”

“Of that, I have no doubt,” Rossi says, amusement still in his voice. “You will need to pass some physical exams to be in the field.”

“I’ve got a prosthetic leg. That gonna be a problem?”

There’s a bare pause, then Rossi asks, “Is it going to slow you down?”

“Fuck no.”

“Then I see no reason why it might be a problem.”

“Good.”

They talk through some of the steps to expect, the niceties, the formalities. When Ed has everything he needs, he pauses and says, “Hey, Rossi.”

“Yes?” 

“How’d you know I would call. And don’t give me that mindreading bullshit.”

Rossi chuckles warmly on the line. “I have no doubt you have half a dozen other offers, and you’ll probably have even more when you graduate. You’re brilliant. You could do anything you want.”

“Not that I don’t appreciate having my ego stroked, but get to the point.”

“You’d have been bored. If there’s one thing I can promise you won’t be with the BAU, it’s bored.”

That, Ed would believe. 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm so sorry this is so short. I hope you enjoyed a little fluff regardless!


End file.
